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Newsroom Teams:
A baseline study of prevalence,
organization and effectiveness
Fred F. Endres
Professor
School of Journalism and Mass Communication
Kent State University
Kent, OH 44242
(330) 672-2572
Fax (330) 672-4064
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Ann B. Schierhorn
Associate Professor
School of Journalism and Mass Communication
Kent State University
Carl Schierhorn
Assistant Professor
School of Journalism and Mass Communication
Kent State University
Presented to AEJMC Newspaper Division
annual convention in New Orleans, La.
August 4, 1999
This research was funded by a grant from the Freedom Forum. The authors thank
David Barwick, graduate assistant in the School of Journalism and Mass
Communication at Kent, for his help on this project.
Newsroom Teams:
A baseline study of prevalence,
organization and effectiveness
Presented to AEJMC Newspaper Division
annual convention in New Orleans, La.
August 4, 1999
This research project was funded by a grant from the Freedom Forum. The authors
thank David Barwick, graduate assistant, for his help.
Newsroom Teams:
A baseline study of prevalence,
organization and effectiveness
Although the concept of teamwork as an organizational model has been promoted
in the business world for the past 25 years, only recently have some newsrooms
begun to adopt the team model. This baseline study of U.S. newspaper managing
editors found that 37 percent reported they had a full or partial permanent team
system in place. Most of those teams were organized by news topic or as an ad
hoc group of reporters, editors and designers who planned and executed specific
stories or packages. Editors who had a team structure expressed satisfaction
with the effectiveness of the structure compared to a traditional beat
structure.
Newsroom Teams:
A baseline study of prevalence, organization and effectiveness
The concept of teamwork in the work place has permeated business literature for
25 years, but the concept of a newsroom organized around teams only recently has
been accepted on some newspapers. This descriptive study seeks to determine,
among other things, the prevalence of teams on newspapers, how they are
operating and how their effectiveness is measured.
Teams, described in business literature as self-directed work teams,
self-managing teams and cross-functional teams, are small groups of employees
responsible for turning out a finished product or service. The team members, who
possess a variety of skills, share responsibility for the finished work.[1]
In his classic work, Management, published 25 years ago, Peter Drucker
predicted the team would become a permanent structural design in business. He
contrasted the team model, in which workers with different skills and tools
collaborate to complete a job, with two other organizational models for work, in
which 1) work moves where the skills and tools are, such as on a factory
assembly line, or 2) work is done sequentially in one place, such as building a
house.[2]
By 1993, influential management consultants Michael Hammer and James Champy
were promoting the team as a new business model that represented a departure
from 200 years of organizational design. They distinguished it from Adam Smith's
principle of the division of labor, in which work is fragmented into tasks, each
one assigned to a specialist.[3] The team model, as they described it, is
organized not around tasks, but around processes.
The team model was pioneered in Britain and Sweden in the 1950s[4] and had
been advocated for several decades, but it became fashionable in the United
States only in the 1980s when companies, propelled by a changing economy, looked
for ways to improve performance.[5] U.S. managers, looking to Europe and the
Far East for ways to increase productivity in the '80s, found models in
companies that used a participatory approach, including teamwork and employee
involvement.[6] W. Edwards Deming, who consulted with Japanese firms on new
management principles to improve productivity and quality, was among those
advocating the use of teams as part of total quality management. In his 14
Points for Management, adopted now by many U.S. companies, he called for
eliminating barriers between departments so that employees in research, design,
sales and production could work as a team.[7]
In 1987, 1990 and 1993, Edward Lawler of the University of Southern California
and researchers Susan Albers Mohrman and Gerald E. Ledford Jr. surveyed Fortune
1000 corporations on their use of participatory management techniques. Their
studies showed that most of the corporations responding reported they chose a
participatory management style, which includes teams,[8] in response to market
pressures, particularly global competition.[9] Specifically, the firms gave as
their primary reasons "to improve productivity," "to improve quality" and "to
improve employee motivation."[10]
The Lawler study showed 70 percent of the companies surveyed in 1993 had
employees involved in self-managing work teams compared to 47 percent in 1990
and 27 percent in 1987. Most of the companies reporting the use of teams in 1993
had no more than 20 percent of their employees involved.[11] However, 68 percent
of those companies surveyed expected to increase use of work teams in the coming
two years.[12]
Reflecting the interest in teams by American businesses, the Harvard Business
School announced plans in 1993 to overhaul its MBA curriculum to place more
emphasis on general management skills such as teamwork and leadership.[13] And a
columnist for The Wall Street Journal counseled readers on the need to learn to
be a team player because many companies were beginning to measure employees'
effectiveness in collaboration as well as in individual contributions.[14]
Although the reengineering movement recently has been vilified because of
corporate downsizing, Lawler and Mohrman in 1998 suggested that the flattening
of hierarchies required for teams is likely to survive as good business
practice, along with many of the approaches of employee involvement and total
quality management.[15]
Among mass communication businesses, the importance of teamwork has long been
recognized in advertising companies. The firm of Doyle Dane Bernbach is credited
with first employing the idea of a creative team in its Volkswagen advertising
campaign of 1949-51.[16] In that campaign, a writer, creative director, art
director and account executive teamed up to launch a successful print
advertising campaign and a creative revolution. The campaign brought the "lemon"
ads, among others, and the concept of representatives of different advertising
departments collaborating on a project.
The team concept increasingly has been advocated for newspapers. As early as
1985, Paul McMasters called for teams in the Newsroom Management Handbook
published by the American Society of Newspaper Editors Foundation.[17] McMasters
cited the experience of The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer and News (where six
editors participated in a team-building project in 1983), but few newspapers
picked up the idea in the 1980s.
Newspaper designer Mario Garcia of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies,
which provides mid-career training for professionals, has promoted what he calls
the "WED" concept, the marriage of writing, editing and design. As he describes
his philosophy, writers, editors and designers collaborate from the idea stage
on a project. This represents a break from the traditional approach, in which
designers are called in after the story is written.[18]
In a videotape and related materials distributed by the American Society of
Newspaper Editors, Buck Ryan advocated "the maestro concept," an approach to
teams that he describes as moving newspapers from an assembly line approach (in
which designers would be given a completed story) to a system that reshapes the
relationship between reporters, assignment editors, photographers, copy editors,
designers and artists.[19] By 1995, Carl Sessions Stepp, writing in American
Journalism Review, could cite newsrooms using a team approach at the Norfolk
Virginian-Pilot, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Portland Oregonian, Dayton Daily
News, Columbia (S.C.) State and The Orange County Register .[20]
Although no survey comparable to Lawler's study of the Fortune 1000 has been
conducted to measure use of teamwork in the news media, the dearth of literature
in academic and trade publications on newspaper teamwork until the 1990s
suggests that newspapers have lagged behind other
industries in adopting a team approach.[21]
However, concerns about declining circulation and competition from electronic
information delivery systems may accelerate newspapers' interest in teamwork.
Indeed, Wichita Eagle managing editor Janet Weaver, who revamped the newspaper's
newsroom hierarchy into teams in 1995, told Presstime, "I want to be part of the
group that helps keep newspaper journalism alive instead of part of the group
that let it die on their watch."[22]
The experience of the Eagle staff is described in a report of the Editorial
Leadership Initiative operated jointly by Northwestern University's Medill
School of Journalism and J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management. That case
study relates how teams were implemented in 1995 and how the newspaper, with a
team organization in place, responded to the destruction of the Federal Building
in Oklahoma City a few months later. [23]
Little other scholarly literature is available on how effectively teams are
working in newsrooms, what problems are surfacing that may be peculiar to
newsrooms, and how those problems are being solved. Regina Louise Lewis, whose
1997 study found newspaper production departments lagged behind advertising
departments and newsrooms in adopting high-performance practices like teams,
says researchers must determine how to measure the effects of such
practices.[24]
Kathleen A. Hansen, Mark Neuzil and Jean Ward studied newsroom teams at the
Minneapolis Star Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press by surveying journalists
on the two staffs for their assessments of teams' effects on news routines and
newspaper quality.[25]
They determined the effects on news process and news quality were predominantly
negative. Some of the issues cited by staffers were the need for more resources,
especially copy editors and photographers; difficulty in working in teams with
colleagues who worked different shifts; newspapers instituting redesigns
simultaneously with restructuring the newsrooms; decision making becoming slower
and more complex; staffers feeling that they had less authority; and lack of
newsroom discipline. Staffers also expressed concern about accuracy, the trend
to softer news stories and the focus on design. The study is more persuasive in
showing that morale suffered when the newsroom switched to teams than it is in
showing that quality suffered. In fact, the researchers acknowledge that readers
(whom they did not survey) and staffers have differing perspectives on newspaper
excellence.
In another study of newsroom teams, John T. Russial used content analysis to
study the effect of one topic team at the Portland Oregonian.[26] The Health and
Science team was formed in 1994 to improve coverage and play of those stories.
Russial found that the use of this team at The Oregonian did increase the number
of stories on this topic overall, the number of staff-written stories and the
section-front play of stories. Because The Oregonian did not increase newshole
at the same time, Russial points out, some news was sacrificed. Russial
determined by interviewing an editor that the news left out of the newspaper as
a result of the change in news values was routine state legislature stories.
Based on anecdotal evidence, Russial also concluded that change was good for
morale at the newspaper.[27]
The present study focuses on a different perspective from these earlier
studies--that of newspaper managing editors. In surveying these individuals,
this project apparently is the first broad, national investigation of teams on
U.S. newspapers. And, while the reliance on managing editors provides a new and
important perspective, it also limits the investigation to the perceptions of
newsroom managers.
Research Questions
Out of the literature and interests of the researchers, the following research
questions were developed. 1. How many papers have newsroom teams and what role
does circulation size play? 2. What was the process by which teams were
developed/implemented? 3. What are the characteristics of teams, including
composition and organization? 4. What is the governance or leadership system
within the teams? 5. What have been the effects of the move to teams? 6. How is
success of team usage measured? 7. What seem to be the strengths and weaknesses
of teams? 8. Why do papers that don't have teams say they don't use them?
Research Design
The authors surveyed a census of U.S. newspapers with more than 25,000 daily
circulation. An eight-page, pre-tested, questionnaire was sent to the managing
editors of 455 newspapers listed in the 1998 Editor & Publisher Yearbook. The
questionnaire was mailed in January 1999, with a reminder and a second
questionnaire sent four weeks later. A total of 192 usable questionnaires were
returned (42.2 percent). By circulation, the returned questionnaires closely
followed circulation categories listed in E&P.[28]
Because only one substantive question was asked of all respondents ("Do you
have newsroom teams?"), the authors were concerned with overall sample error and
degree of confidence only on that question. The return of 192 questionnaires
produced a sample error of +/- 5.1 percent at a 95 percent degree of confidence.
The papers that said they had teams, thus, became a subsample with a resultant
larger sample error.
Two related, but not methodologically synonymous, independent variables were
used in most analyses: Circulation, as described above, and Employees, a
three-tiered stratum representing the number of full-time newsroom employees.
The tiers, with distribution in percentages, were: more than 100 employees--34
percent; 51 to 100 employees--28.7 percent; and 50 or fewer employees--37.2
percent. Appropriate for a descriptive study, data were analyzed by chi square
and ANOVA.
Findings
Research Question 1: How many, what configuration. Seventy-one of the 192
responding newspapers (37 percent) said they had a formal team system in place
to one degree or another. This was significant by chi square analysis (p.
[23] Gary Graham and Tracy Thompson, Inside Newsroom Teams: An Editor's Guide
to the Promise and Problems. Evanston, Ill.: NMC, 1997.
[24] Regina Louise Lewis, "How Managerial Evolution Affects Newspaper Firms,"
Newspaper Research Journal, Winter-Spring 1997, pp. 103-125.
[25] Kathleen A. Hansen, Mark Neuzil and Jean Ward, Newsroom Topic Teams:
Journalists' Assessments of Effects on News Routines and Newspaper Quality,
paper presented at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass
Communication, Chicago, Ill., August 1997.
[26] John T. Russial, "Topic-Team Performance: A Content Study," Newspaper
Research Journal, Winter-Spring 1997, pp. 126-144.
[27] Russial's conclusion about morale may have been hasty. Oregonian executive
editor Sandra Mims Rowe told the Freedom Forum Newspaper Training Editors
Conference in San Francisco in May 1997 that flattening the newsroom structure
from one in which there were seven layers of editors between reporters and her
to one in which there are now two layers was difficult. In fact, it took a
stormy newsroom retreat to iron out problems at the newspaper. See Jack Hart,
unpublished manuscript, The Will to Change: A Management History of The
Oregonian, September 1995.
[28] Editor & Publisher circulation categories, as a percentage of all papers
of more than 25,000 circulation, were: more than 100,000--23.3 percent; 50,001
to 100,000--29.4 percent; and 25,001-50,000--47.3 percent. Survey returns by the
same circulation categories were: more than 100,000--25.8 percent; 50,001 to
100,000--29.4 percent; and 25,001 to 50,000--47.9 percent.